Feelings in Relationships

Sep3

If you are in the beginning stages of a relationship, an established relationship or even a marriage, shouldn’t you be able to ask your partner about their feelings and emotions? I understand the desire to avoid some painful topics, but if I ask you questions about your feelings, it is only because I am attempting to get personal and make an emotional connection with you. Isn’t that what partners in a relationship do? Isn’t that what people that love one another do?

When then is it so hard for some to open up to one another? Remember, there are a number of ingredients in a relationship: trust, communication and empathy, all of which play an important role in this situation. It only benefits us then to open up possibilities for sharing emotions with one another. We have all experienced pain and suffering sometime in our lives, but being honest and open about it gives the listener or the one asking the questions the chance to understand you a little better and to make that emotional connection with you. If your partner does not respond with the compassion and empathy that you expected or deserved, then that reflects on his character and NOT on you, the person that just revealed her emotions and feelings. Yes, sharing such intimate feelings of pain and sorrow can create feelings of vulnerability and even make us feel uncomfortable, but it will also allow us to make connections with our partner that are meaningful and beneficial to the relationship.

Emotions and feelings are actually the glue that binds couples together. Emotions and feelings are the groundwork of your ability to understand yourself as well as to relate to your partner. When you can control your emotions, you can clearly communicate your emotions and feelings as well as let your guard down, trust, become vulnerable and open yourself up to your partner. You will enjoy a healthier and happier relationship.

We all have the ability to experience many emotions including joy, fear, pain, sorrow and anger. But many of us are usually disconnected from these feelings in some way or another. By attempting to avoid these feelings, our emotions have become distorted in a way and have been placed on the “back burner” so to speak. We kind of forget about them and avoid them, but avoiding them can cause serious damage to our relationship. For instance, distracting yourself with some sort of obsessive or destructive behavior in order to avoid these feelings you dislike so much. Or sticking to a single response when someone brings up something that makes you uncomfortable and you retort by making a joke to avoid feeling sad or feeling insecure. Or lastly, you may even shut down completely by totally disconnecting from those harsh feelings. This can be bad for not only you, but for you partner as well. If you shut out your emotions, you’re shutting out your emotions. By that I mean you are shutting out both the good and the bad emotions so you are unable to experience the good things like love, trust and intimacy. It also takes quite a bit of energy to keep these feelings suppressed versus sharing them with the one you love. This can eventually become quite exhausting. And finally, it will damage your relationship. The more distant you become from your feelings, the more distant you become from your partner. You break the line of communication, but you also break the trust that is the foundation of the relationship which could possibly cause some resentment from your partner.

You can change. You can trust and feel safe sharing your feelings with the one you love. Trusting your partner and allowing them into your safety zone is frightening, and if you are afraid of a breach of trust, this can be quite devastating and can damage your desire to ever be intimate again. Always remember, relationships are built on feelings. When those in a relationship are honest with one another, they experience pain at times, but they will not experience the misery of a relationship built on lies or the lack of intimacy by one partner towards the other. Feelings come and go. Only those feelings that you act upon matter in the big scheme of things as well as in love and in relationships!

This entry was posted
on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 12:43 PM and is filed under Love.
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